


In From The Cold

by tielan



Series: Fire And Ice: MCU Jaeger AU [6]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Jaegers, Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-22
Updated: 2016-06-22
Packaged: 2018-07-16 14:35:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7272079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her first impression of him is <i>dangerous</i>. Her second is <i>deceptive</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In From The Cold

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Zippit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zippit/gifts).



Natasha Romanoff wakes up from a four month coma, screaming.

Even as her brainwaves spike, the EEG on her side of the bed squealing away like a startled animal, the EEG on the other side of the bed never twitches.

The Drift is dead.

 

The first time Natasha steps onto a Kwoon floor after _Scarlet Cypher_ goes down, her vision spins, scarlet _bo_ sticks hashing across her retinas like the aftermath of the fight. Her stomach hurts, stabbing into her lower abdomen, wrapping tendrils of pain around her midsection. She can’t breathe, because the air is full of blood, the iron-tinged stain of Yelena’s sanity dripping from their nose, from their ears, the pressure in her head screaming with the strain of piloting.

 _Fuck them all,_ rasps Yelena, her mind bleeding at the edges, fraying in the Drift. _Let them die screaming in_ kaiju _blue._

If she could move, she’d turn around, walk out of the Kwoon, walk out of the Jaeger program, catch the next transport back home to Mother Russia and spend what’s left of her days teaching the bright-eyed little children how to pilot a Jaeger into death and come out of it a ghost, with no more substance than the _rusalka_ of old myth and legend, and rather more grief and rage burning within them…

A hand touches her shoulder, unexpected and shocking. “Hey.”

She moves without thought, without consideration, the actions fluid in her muscles even if they ache in her bones. The move should have him on his knees with his arm behind his back, his cheek mashed against the floor. Somehow he eels out of the lock, shoving her away so she fetches up against the bare wall by the entryway.

Her first impression of him is _dangerous_. Her second is _deceptive_.

Her third is that in spite of being attacked by a woman on a trigger-hair, he seems more anxious than angry; he’s taken a step back, his hands up in an attempt to show himself harmless. “Hey, sorry about that.” He repeats, and if he’s a little breathless, well, he was just attacked by a woman on a trigger-hair. “You okay?”

Natasha takes a breath and finds the air is clear. “Yes.”

His gaze is keen, but he takes her at her word rather than her state. “Romanoff, right?” One lean hand is held out, the frame of it blocky, but the fingers deft. “Barton. Clint Barton.”

“Shaken, not stirred?”

He grins as she shakes his hand, and the grip is fierce and firm. “Shaken, stirred, crunched up, spat back out.” As he walks into the Kwoon, heading for the ‘locker wall’ with its storage cubes and jacket pegs, Natasha realizes he’s walking with a slight limp – an old injury? Or a new one? Then he sits down, and she thinks _new_ because the movement is a little awkward, without the comfort of a familiar ache. Then he peels off his jacket and tucks it into one of the boxes, displaying nicely muscled shoulders in a grey PPDC-issue singlet. And an instinct she hasn’t felt in a long time sits up and thinks, _desirable._

 _Too much point,_ whispers Yelena, _not enough putty._

Maybe so, but sometimes, Natasha thinks,  one doesn’t wish for a malleable man.

Perhaps her silence goes too long, because he looks up, head tilted like a bird. “You here to use the mats or just to hold up the wall?”

She sits down beside him,  taking off her own jacket and vest, shedding her shoes and socks, and selecting a _bo_ from the rack.

“You know the Kwoon basics?”

Barton snorts. “You don’t get through the Academy without learning them.”

The basics  are the original thirty-six moves that Stacker Penecost codified into a fighting style that remains one of the best indicators of Drift Compatibility among would-be pilots, four years later. Still, not everyone knows them – the technical and mechanical branches of the Rangers generally skip those lessons – and even among those who initially aspire to be Jaeger pilots, the practice rates are pretty low.

Questions rise in her throat; she swallows them down. Now is not the time, here is not the place, and he is not the one to ask.

So they line up, side by side, and start on the basic moves, slow and steady.

Once it would have been effortless, something she performed without thought or consciousness. Now, Natasha is painfully aware of the absence to her left, like a fracture in her mind. Still, Barton doesn’t fill the silence with chatter and doesn’t push her to speak, just moves with her in an easy synchonicity.

After the poking  and the prodding, the questions and the pity, it’s a relief to be around someone who doesn’t demand answers, or a rehash, or even grief from her.

And even when they’re done, all he asks is, “Same time, same place tomorrow?”

“Yes,” she says.

 

She toils through her day – engineering reports with Operations staff, make-work for a woman who is more ghost than person – and dreams of crossing _bo_ with Yelena, their partnership piercing as a laser, deadly as a Black Widow spider, and – so, everyone said – with no off-switch.

 _If only the kaiju had an off,_ she muttered when Starkovsky berated them for being too enthusiastic in a fight.

And yet, for them, there was no ‘off’ - not so long as the _kaiju_ came through the Breach. Others did it for glory and praise, to be heroes, to protect the world.

 _We have venom in us,_ Yelena said after their first kill. _Better us than someone without bite._

She can see Yelena now, the wild toss of blonde hair that she kept long ‘for vanity’, her hands on her hips, insouciant. She can feel her co-pilot’s smile against the inside of her skin. Then catches her breath as the other woman sagged, and her body went limp in the pilot harness, the dark stain on her lip dripping down Natasha’s chin...

She jerks awake in darkness, and her hand shakes as she lifts it to swipe at her upper lip.

In the dark, her mind skitters around the crater of the pilot-bond, trying to scrape the bleeding shards of pain and loss and emptiness into something resembling wholeness, even as her tears soak into the pillow.

 

The next day, it’s the same time, same place, same moves, same quiet. They move through the basics, slow and steady. Natasha focuses on her body, on her control, on her breathing, and avoids the aching gap in her mind, the blankness where Yelena’s acid laughter used to sound.

Again, the only question Barton asks her is at the end, “Same time tomorrow?”

Same time tomorrow.

The pattern continues the day after that.

And the day after that.

And the day after that.

It becomes routine, habitual, comfortable – the murmured acknowledgement, the stripping down, the movements in synchronisation, the silent acceptance of her loss.

Even the nightmares become routine in a way – the sharp and sudden wakefulness, the hollow emptiness in her mind like the ground suddenly falling away, and the brief and brutal spasm of her brain as sheer power lashed back at them through the neural interface.

“You’re not sleeping well.” Barton’s voice is calm, although the flick of his gaze towards her, then away speaks of discomfort. “Have you seen the docs about something to get through the night?”

It takes her a moment to find the words she wants. “I don’t like drugs. They make me fuzzy.”

“Sometimes fuzzy helps.” He rolls his shoulders, swinging his arms, his bones audiblly cracking as he pulls his hands up over his head and lunges carefully forward on first one leg, then the other. “Not forever, of course, but just for a while.”

“Did it help you?”

“A little.”

It’s then that Natasha realize that in nearly three weeks of meeting up in the Kwoon she hasn’t asked anything about him. She knows almost nothing of this man but his name and that he keeps his body in good shape. His sense of humor is dark and his fighting style is blunt and direct. He grins rarely, but has the trick of appearing to smile even when his mouth is in a straight line.

And he hasn’t asked anything of her apart from her name and her company.

 

Clint Barton, it turns out, was a Jumphawk. One of the squad leaders, in fact, pilot-rated. His chopper went down during Thunder Strike’s fight against the Trickster six months ago, and he dropped off the active roster.

That much Natasha can learn by looking up his file, a quick skim of the relevant details. She learns more by making a discreet request or two, and asking for an opinion from a handful of people she trusts.

“They got side-swiped by a _kaiju_ while out escorting Thunder Strike, and according to all the laws of God and physics, should have gone down like a stone,” says Jasper. “Somehow he saved himself and two others, even if they lost the rest of the squad and had to scrap the Chinook.”

Phil is little more personal. “He’s got an eye for detail, and a knack for flight. Ex-wife, two kids on support – they lost the third during a _kaiju_ attack and it broke the marriage.”

“Clint Barton?” Maria sounds surprised. “Has a good eye for piloting, a good head for the moves in the middle of a _kaiju_ fight. He was in my year at the Academy, too – say hi for me, and tell him he’d better be keeping the beer cold. And get the docs to prescribe you something to sleep; raccoon eyes look just isn’t your style.”

Natasha doesn’t take offence at the bluntness; the gruffness disguises Maria’s concern and it’s almost comforting to be prodded in a casual and familiar way.

Besides, she already had it from Phil that Maria’s been driving herself hard since _Scarlet Cypher_ went down – as though a mere Operations Head could have done something when the Stinger technology came out of Stark Industries without proper insulation testing.

She’s a little nervous the next morning, wondering how he’ll take it that she basically researched him. Wondering if he’ll even care. And trying not to wonder why it matters.

Hugging her legs to her chest as she watches him limber up, she decides it’s now or never. “Maria Hill says hello, and you should be keeping the beer cold.”

His mouth twitches in one of his smiles. “Hill, huh? Where is she these days?”

“Head of Operations in Lima. ”

“Always figured she’d end up organising somewhere. She had too much sense to Jumphawk long.”

“She was a Jumphawk?”

“For about a month. Then they realized that she could juggle Shatterdome Floor Operations better than the old military Sergeants they had doing the job, and stole her away.”

Natasha feels a slight pang at the grin on his face. “Maybe you should get in contact.”

“I should.” Barton shrugs out of his jacket and hangs it up on the peg. “How do you know her?”

“She was the one who originally brought up the issue with the Stinger blades. She got in touch with Stark Industries and managed to hunt down the original specs and test results. Then, when it became clear the output ratios were dangerous, she tried to persuade the PPDC to hold _Cypher_ back in reserve...”

He sits down beside her as she trails off.

Natasha doesn’t look at him; she’s had enough sympathy, enough kindness, enough of being treated like she’s broken, fragile, incomplete. She left Vladivostok to get away from the worst of it.

Now, she’s starting to realize, she should have walked away from the PPDC entirely.

“I don’t remember much of…the fight before _Cypher_ overloaded, just…a high-pitched keening. And then everything on fire, Yelena looking at me, and blood on her lip – on mine—”

The hand on her shoulder doesn’t startle her like it did the first time, even though he grips tight. The dull ache of physical pain pushes through the panic. “You survived.”

She takes a deep breath and looks at him. “I know.” Her smile is tired. “That’s the problem.”

“That’s bullshit,” he says, flatly. “You and your friend were two separate people who piloted a Jaeger together, not missing halves of your souls or some such crap.”

“The Drift—”

“Is for piloting a Jaeger; not for living life.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Maybe not. But you’re sure as hell not making it easier by reaching for something that’s not there anymore.”

The harshness in his voice strikes a spark of venom in her. “Is that what you did after your Chinook  went down?”

Clint stills and she wishes she hadn’t brought up his fall. Then, after a long silence during which she struggles to find an apology, he sighs. “You run,” he says, quietly. “But not very far. Just to get some distance, to….try to separate it out.” He hunches forward, elbows on knees, staring at his hands, long fingers sliding over each other. “But where you are doesn’t really matter, because it’s in _here_.” He taps his temple and meets her gaze. “Isn’t it?”

She swallows. “Yes.”

“And it’ll always be here, no matter what I do or don’t do.” His mouth twists, brief and bitter.  What’s that saying? _Regrets are the price of a well-lived life_?”

“In Russia,” Natasha says after a moment, “the quotation would be: ;Важно не то, как долго ты прожил, а как хорошо жил’ – ‘ _How well you live makes a difference, not how long_.’”

He snorts. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

“Do you wish you had died?”

The answer takes a few seconds, considered, not easy. “Sometimes. Do you wish you’d died?”

There’s a moment when ‘ _Yes_ ’ is poised on her lips, ready to take flight. Then, “No.”

It tears at her a little, although perhaps not quite as hard as it might have a month ago – or even a week. And suddenly, Natasha sees that, whatever her mental state, Yelena is still in the world. And if Natasha woke up, maybe Yelena will, too. Eventually. Someday.

Natasha takes a deep breath, still feeling a little shaky. “I miss her.”

“I hear that happens.” The grip on her shoulder tightens, a brief squeeze of comfort and reassurance before he drops it and stands, crossing the room. “You want to run through the basics? Or are you out of time?”

“I’ve got time for the basics.” The next words fall out of her. “Do you have time for a bout?”

It’s a fraction of a second – a slight hitch, a momentary hesitation before he turns, smiling. “A _bo_ dance on the floor? With you?” The smile softens to a grin. “Always.”

**Author's Note:**

> Related works in same universe: [Not The Standard Model](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7011121) and [Fire Breathers](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7161629) \- Pepper Potts & Maria Hill


End file.
